The HPC Wrangler
Explaining my new title
The eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed that I added HPC Wrangler to my title/ role. What’s up with that?
While the world of HPC and supercomputers may seem like it’s made up of datacentres filled with perfectly aligned racks themselves packed with identical servers that continue for as far as the eye can see, the reality is often a bit messier.
Everyone always wants more compute. Think OpenAI demanding more compute than needed to power the sun is something new? Nah. So HPC practitioners are often figuring out ways to add more. We’re in a constant process of borrowing, appropriating and straight up just stealing additional compute. All the time.
Whether you’re running on prem and scavenging capacity from other teams, decommed servers and even desktops, or running in the cloud and scraping out the last bit of spot capacity you can find, HPC is often about rustling up more compute. Shepherding servers together to operate as a single cohesive cluster.
Except HPC Shepherd doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. So HPC Wrangler it is.
It has nothing at all to do with the fact I went to see Twisters last weekend with my wife and there was a character that referred to himself as a tornado wrangler. That absolutely is not where the idea came from. Subconsciously or otherwise 🤣
